SECRET 5: SPRINKLE IT WITH SUPER MOOD FOODS

The Promise

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In one week of making this change, you will:

image   have more energy

image   begin to appreciate the flavor of foods

In one month, you will:

image   think more clearly

image   feel less stressed

image   drop a few pounds

image   notice an improvement in mood

In one year, you will:

image   slow your brain’s aging

image   lower your risk for all age-related disease

image   lose weight

image   feel great

The first time I met Teresa, she weighed more than 350 pounds. She was a waitress at a café on the way to the coast in Oregon, and her size made it difficult for her to maneuver between the two tables and four booths crammed into the tiny restaurant. She had a beautiful face, but it was no secret she was miserable. It was an effort for her to move her body as she shuttled orders from the kitchen to the customers.

When I stopped at the café two years later, I hardly recognized Teresa. She’d lost 192 pounds and looked like a million bucks. Not only was she lean, she was radiant. That beautiful face glowed and she moved gracefully around the café like a ballroom dancer. She walked with her shoulders back and her head high. Her smile was no longer forced. She was truly happy and it showed.

When I asked her how she had lost the weight, she said,

“I started paying attention to what the skinny people were ordering. They chose spinach salads with dressing on the side. They asked for their sandwiches on whole-grain bread with no mayo. They made a meal out of the soup of the day. They drank the fresh-squeezed orange juice, not the homemade milk shakes. They had the berries in season, not the apple pie with ice cream for dessert. It dawned on me that my weight wasn’t my lot in life. I was exactly the weight I should be considering the foods I ate. If I ate like those skinny people, I’d look like them.”

And so she took cues from the happy, fit people who frequented her restaurant and, over the course of two years, dropped a ton of weight. She also regained her energy and confidence. She was happy, vibrant and obviously pleased with herself.

What Teresa didn’t realize is that by eating like her happy, fit customers, she was following a diet based on real foods with an emphasis on some of the most powerful super mood foods Mother Nature has to offer. That diet not only helped her lose weight, but it kept her happy in the process. The next time I stopped at the café, Teresa was gone. The new waitress told me she’d fallen in love and gotten married. The last they had heard from her was a postcard from Rome.

This Time, Do It Right!

The best diet plans help you get around the deprivation issue by ensuring you get plenty of low-calorie foods so you don’t go hungry—a rumbling stomach is a guaranteed road to bad-moodsville. That’s a great strategy. Why not take it one step further and follow a diet trick or two from people, like Teresa, who have lost weight and stayed happy by adding a few of the tried-and-true foods known to boost mood, memory and drop pounds?

Yes, there are a few foods, when added to a calorie-and portion-controlled real foods diet, that can give you an added kick in the mood butt, as well as speed weight loss. They also sharpen your mind and reduce stress, which is pretty amazing, since most fad diets increase stress hormones, make us dumber, slow our reaction times, muddle the mind—and then fail in the long run.

Happy superfoods. Choose the right foods and they keep you on a steady course of feeling your best. “I see many people fall into the ‘dieting depression,’ which lowers motivation and undermines a person’s chances at successfully losing weight, and more importantly, keeping the weight off,” says John Foreyt, Ph.D., Director of the Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and an expert on weight management. To avoid this trap, you should set realistic goals, take little steps toward successful weight loss and sprinkle your diet with a few superfoods that nourish your mood, mind and body.

Combine what you learned in Chapter 1 about real foods with the super mood foods in this chapter and you are guaranteed to feel amazing and lose weight. That’s what Whitney, a public relations executive in San Francisco, found:

“I eat really well when I’m at home and have lots of energy and feel great. But I don’t think I truly appreciated how important eating the right foods are until my job required travel. That’s when I eat the processed stuff. It makes me feel awful, fat and bloated (especially salty things), which is probably why I feel so tired when I’m on the road. Now I really get how eating right can make a world of difference in your energy and mood.”

If your typical diet is like Whitney’s travel fare, then you will be amazed how great you feel when you switch to a real-foods diet trimmed in super foods.

The Natural High

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Eating right is not about a handful of foods, but rather the healthiness of the entire diet. That said, a few foods are truly super, packing in more than their share of nutrients and phytonutrients that boost memory, energy and mood and reduce stress, while at the same time helping guarantee permanent weight loss and tasting divine.

The Story Behind Superfoods

Lots of processed foods at the grocery store, from exotic juices to designer yogurts, try to convince you they are packed with more than their share of nutrients or antioxidants. Most are more hype than help. What truly makes a food super?

image   It must have a ton of nutrients for only a few calories. Think of it as a super-low “cal-a-nut” ratio—for each calorie you get a whopping dose of waist-slimming fiber and mood-boosting vitamins and minerals.

image   There must be proof that this food speeds weight loss, revs metabolism, aids in burning body fat, fills you up on fewer calories and/or helps you stick with your diet.

image   It must be loaded with antioxidants. These are the nutrients and close to a million phytonutrients in unprocessed foods that protect the brain from little oxygen fragments, called free radicals, that otherwise speed aging, clog memory, dampen your mood, increase stress and even drain energy.

A food must have all these qualities to make the grade. Granted, some foods are higher in antioxidants or have a low cal-a-nut ratio, but since they don’t meet the other two criteria, they fall short on being a super mood food.

Of course, there are tons of supernutritious foods that are great inclusions in any diet, but to list them all would fill volumes. So I’m picking my 12 favorites. Add these to the real foods discussed in the other chapters and you have a one-two punch for boosting mood and slimming your waistline.

What Do Free Radicals Have to Do with You?

Super mood foods are loaded with antioxidants. To understand why these are so important, you need a short course in free radicals.

Free radicals are oxygen fragments inhaled in air pollution and tobacco smoke, consumed in fatty foods and generated in the body during normal metabolic processes. Left unchecked, these oxygen fragments, or oxidants, attack cell membranes and the genetic code, a process called oxidation. Your body “rusts” when exposed to oxygen, which causes cells to either die or mutate. Cell “rusting,” or oxidation, contributes to all age-related diseases, from heart disease and cancer to cataracts and possibly osteoporosis.

Free radicals also damage the delicate communication pathways in your brain. Minute by minute, day by day, year after year, decade upon decade, free radicals are attacking and damaging one brain cell after another until the buildup results in memory loss, slowed reaction times, reduced alertness and even Alzheimer’s disease. The damage they do to brain cells also contributes to fatigue, feeling blue and being stressed out. Next time you walk into a room and can’t remember why you came in there or once again forgot where you put your keys, you might be experiencing firsthand the effects of daily free radical attacks.

Gimme My Antioxidants

The good news is, your body has an anti–free radical system, called antioxidants, that prevents oxidants from damaging cells. Antioxidants also help keep the heart beating strong and protect the tiny blood vessels that transport nutrients and oxygen to brain cells. Since 20% of the heart’s output goes to the brain, all of these benefits mean improved blood flow and better thinking, more energy, improved mood and less stress. The trick is to maintain an antioxidant arsenal equal to or better than the daily onslaught of free radicals.

Stockpiling antioxidants is essential throughout life, especially when we are stressed and as we age. Stress is a death sentence for brain cells. Feeling tense and anxious sets off a cascade of events, releasing chemicals and hormones, including cortisol, that generate a free-radical flood that is toxic to brain cells and that undermines your ability to think and be happy. No wonder people with high blood levels of cortisol score lower on memory tests compared to people who are relatively stress-free. As we get older, oxidative damage to tissues, including the brain, intensifies; that means a 60-year-old needs more antioxidant-rich foods than a 30-year-old, who needs more than a 12-year-old.

Rating the Antioxidants

All fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, tea, chocolate and wine—in short, just about any real food—have antioxidants. What makes one super and one not? It’s the amount of antioxidants.

To measure a food’s antioxidant content, researchers use the ORAC test, which stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. This is a measure of the total antioxidant content in a given food and thus how many free radicals a specific food can absorb and destroy. The more oxygen radicals a food absorbs, the higher its ORAC score. The higher its ORAC score, the better it is at helping our bodies prevent memory loss and cope with stress.

Nutrition experts estimate each one of us needs a minimum of 3,000 ORAC points a day to even begin to protect the mind, mood and body, though most Americans average less than half that amount. A daily ORAC intake of 10,000 or more is even better. In fact, no one has yet found an upper limit. Most of the 12 super mood foods listed below have hearty ORAC scores.

You can’t store antioxidants, so you must replenish ORAC points every day. That means you need these and lots of other real foods in just about every meal you eat.

A word of caution.

Many tests promise to evaluate your antioxidant status. They might take urine, skin or blood samples to measure by-products of free radical metabolism. Assessing antioxidant status, however, is not that simple and never gives you the whole picture of what’s going on in your body. For example, one test uses a scanner that shines a laser through your finger. It measures only a handful of carotenoids, not the entire gamut of close to a million antioxidants in the fruits, vegetables and other real foods you eat. There’s also a catch—the company that markets the scanner also sells supplements specifically designed to raise blood levels of the few carotenoids they are testing (surprise!). In reality, the only way to be guaranteed your antioxidant arsenal is stocked is to eat a real-foods diet with daily inclusions of some of the superfoods in this chapter.

A Word About Variety

Variety is the spice of life.

Variety is the soul of pleasure.

The joy of life is variety.

No pleasure endures unseasoned by variety.

Variety, variety, variety. You’ve heard the rule a million times: eat a variety of foods. Of course, those wise diet gurus aren’t recommending you eat a variety of doughnuts, cookies, chips, cupcakes and other junk. No, they mean a variety of real foods—fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, legumes and more. For one thing, no one food supplies all the nutrients you need. Therefore, the more varied your diet, the more likely you will get the right dose of all the 40+ nutrients.

Second, foods are not all fun and games. Even the most nutritious food contains a harmful substance or two. For example, cabbage is absolutely packed with fiber, vitamins and antioxidants. On the flip side, it also contains compounds called goitrogens that interfere with your thyroid. No big deal if you eat cabbage a few times a week, but go on some cabbage diet, feasting only on platters of cabbage day after day, and you might have a problem. Eat a variety of foods and you avoid overdosing on any one harmful substance.

Third, you get the best antioxidant protection when you eat different antioxidant-rich foods. For example, drink only mangosteen juice or limit your fruit to just handfuls of berries every day and your antioxidant levels rise, but that does not necessarily mean you’ll think better or live longer. You need a variety of superfoods every day. Eat blueberries and nuts today, strawberries and oranges tomorrow, pomegranates on your spinach salad the next day and so forth, and antioxidant levels soar, plus you think better, feel better and outlive everybody.

The message here: choose a diet based on real foods, sprinkle that diet with a variety of super mood foods and vary your choices from meal to meal, day to day and week to week.

IncrEdibles: The Dynamic Dozen

From soup to nuts, the following 12 foods pack a huge mood and waist-slimming punch. Add them as often as possible to your real-food diet. Of course, many other foods are super mood foods, too. But, for the sake of space, start with these.

1. Nuts

Kristen, a nurse in Ohio, had the hardest time sticking to diets:

“I was the classic yo-yoer. I’ve tried low-carb and high-carb, SlimFast and Jenny Craig, fasting and soup diets. Oh sure, all of them worked at first. I’d drop a few pounds, but then the weight came back. This is going to sound silly, but what finally worked for me was snacking on nuts. Of course, I also had to exercise and pay attention to portions like I’d done on the other diets, but just having that one moment during the day when I could have something really satisfying was enough to keep me on track. I’ve lost 25 pounds and kept it off for five years.”

Many people are much more successful when they add a few healthy fats, such as nuts and olive oil, to their weight-loss diets than if they try to stick with very-low-fat diets. There are three reasons why nuts help you stay happy and fit.

1. Nuts are fiber-rich, so even an ounce is enough to take the edge off hunger. (Their phytonutrient and antioxidant ORAC scores are high, too. For example, an ounce of pistachios packs 2,661 ORAC points, while pecans tally a whopping 5,980 on the ORAC scale!)

2. Nuts raise the metabolic rate by up to 11%, thus helping burn more calories.

3. Nuts help regulate blood sugar. They have a low glycemic index (GI). Compared to potatoes or corn flakes, which rank in the 80s on the GI scale, peanuts and other nuts rank as low as 14, meaning they don’t raise blood sugar levels and thus don’t stimulate appetite or fat storage. Peanuts also contain a compound called arginine that helps regulate the hormone insulin, which helps maintain normal blood sugar levels. The more you control blood sugar, the easier time you’ll have managing your weight, which explains why an ounce of nuts a day helps slim waistlines.

Speaking of peanuts, these nuts are weird. You may think of them as a nut, but they really are a bean. In fact, they straddle the fence between nuts and legumes, which is a good thing. That means they have all the good stuff of a nut, such as the healthy fats, magnesium and vitamin E, but they also have all the nutrition advantages of a bean, such as folic acid, potassium and phytonutrients (called saponins and sterols). All those nutrients improve mood, aid in sleep and/or help you better cope with stress. They even have something in common with red wine, resveratrol, an antioxidant that helps keep your arteries elastic and squeaky clean. (Unfortunately, roasting destroys resveratrol.)

How much? 1 ounce a day.

Eat more: Eat nuts plain or toss them into salads, cereals or yogurt. Add nuts to meatless stir frys or to pancake and muffin batters. Make homemade trail mix with equal parts nuts and dried fruit (such as dried tart cherries). Replace pine nuts with other nuts, such as pistachios, when making pesto sauce. Add nuts to salads or to desserts. Combine nuts with yogurt, apples and celery to make a quick Waldorf salad. Dip baby carrots in peanut butter. Coat fish or chicken with ground nuts before cooking.

2. Soy

Happy, fit people repeatedly tell me that they lost more weight when they added soy to their calorie-controlled diets than when they added other protein-rich foods, like beef or whey powders.

It could be soy’s protein, since protein is much more filling than either fat or carbs. Also the protein in soy is lean, which is far superior to the greasy protein in most red meats.

What sets soy apart from other protein-rich foods, however, is that soy also has phytoestrogens, compounds that help burn body fat. The combination of protein and phytoestrogens is superpowerful for weight loss, since it helps satisfy you on fewer calories and boosts metabolism. Soy also curbs elevated blood sugar and reduces blood cholesterol and insulin levels.

Beyond weight loss, soy has superpowers in boosting memory. It might be because of the phytoestrogens, or maybe it is the antioxidants in soy that protect the brain and possibly improve mood. People who eat soy-based foods (not supplements!) show less damaging effects on brain tissue during stress, and their brains stay youthful even into their later years, which means better memory and thinking ability. And it’s never too late. Memory improves at all stages of life, even into your seventies or beyond, when soy is included regularly in the diet.

How much? 25 grams of soy protein a day, or the equivalent of three glasses of soy milk.

Eat more: Use soy milk to replace milk in meals and recipes, especially brands that are fortified with the omega-3 fat DHA. Sprinkle edemame (green soybeans) in salads and side dishes. Substitute mashed tofu for ricotta cheese in recipes or add to egg dishes. Snack on dry-roasted soy nuts. Or try any of the delicious recipes with soy in this book.

3 and 4. Milk and Yogurt

It seemed a fluke when the first study reported that calcium aids weight loss; a mineral that builds bone could not possibly burn body fat.

Further studies showed as calcium intake increased, body fat decreased. With each glass of milk (or 300 milligram increase in regular calcium intake), a person could expect to lose 5 to 6 pounds of body fat. In fact, as calcium intake goes up, body fat goes down. One study comparing people consuming either very-low-calorie diets (800 calories a day), 800-calorie diets based on milk products, or 1,300-calorie diets based on milk products, found that people on the 1,300-calorie diet lost three times as much weight as those on the low-calcium 800-calorie diet. Lose more weight by eating more food? Now that’s a great diet!

How does calcium help with weight loss? Although poorly understood, calcium is important in energy metabolism and especially in storing and burning body fat. High-calcium diets might help block calories from being stored as fat on your hips and thighs, thus reducing the chance of gaining weight during times of overeating. The combination of calcium and vitamin D seems to be most effective at burning fat tissue, but it is unclear exactly why. Or maybe it is a mood issue, since calcium helps to balance mood during stressful times. Here’s the best part—chocolate milk has all the weight-busting potential of plain milk, plus more than 3,000 ORAC points per glass!

Yogurt is just as good, and it provides healthy bacteria to prevent bloating and help flatten the tummy. You have good and bad bacteria in your gut. The good guys, the ones in yogurt (especially acidophilus, bifidum and rhamnosus), help keep the gastrointestinal tract in tip-top working order and reduce gas or constipation. Stick to plain, nonfat yogurt and sweeten it yourself at home with jam or fruit.

The link with calcium and weight still needs more proof, but since calcium is needed for a host of other stuff, from building bones to taking the crankiness out of PMS, it is wise to add at least 1,000 milligrams of calcium from nonfat milk products to a daily weight-loss plan.

How much? Three cups a day of nonfat or 1% milk or two cups of yogurt.

Eat more: Cook rice or oatmeal in milk. Add milk to coffee or tea. Add nonfat dry milk powder to pancake or muffin batters. Layer fruit and yogurt in a parfait glass or make pudding with nonfat milk for desserts. Top waffles or French toast with yogurt and fruit. Make creamed soups and sauces with evaporated nonfat milk instead of cream. Use undiluted evaporated milk in mashed potatoes. Blend milk or yogurt with fruit for smoothies. Use plain yogurt instead of sour cream for dips, salad dressing and toppings; mix equal parts low-fat mayonnaise and yogurt for coleslaw or potato salad.

5. Dark Green Leafies

As a nerdy dietitian, it’s difficult for me to understand how anyone can be happy without dark green leafies in the daily diet. From spinach, chard and collards to leaf lettuce, beet greens and broccoli, these are the very best sources of the B vitamin folate. Your brain cells won’t turn on without it. It’s no wonder that poor intake of folate increases the risk for depression, fatigue, poor memory and possibly even more serious mental problems like schizophrenia. People battling the blues who boost their intake of greens say they feel better and happier as a result. (Remember, it was spinach salads, not iceberg salads, that those happy, fit people at Teresa’s café were eating.) People who are clinically depressed only respond to antidepressant therapy if their blood levels of folate are high.

Packed with vitamins and minerals, one serving of dark greens supplies an entire day’s requirement for vitamin A, more than 3 milligrams of iron, almost a third of your daily need for folate, and hefty amounts of calcium and B vitamins, all for about 20 calories. A one-cup serving of cooked Swiss chard supplies more than half of a woman’s daily recommendation for magnesium, a mineral that helps her cope with stress, curbs symptoms of PMS and aids in sleep. Phytonutrients, such as sulforaphane in broccoli and the carotenoids in carrots, spinach or romaine lettuce, clear toxins from the body and strengthen your resistance to colds and infections. On top of that, a cup of broccoli adds 3,632 ORAC points and a cup of raw spinach adds another 4,040 ORAC points to the daily menu.

How much? Two servings a day (one serving is 1 cup raw or ½ cup cooked).

Eat more: Replace iceberg lettuce in salads and sandwiches with leaf lettuce or spinach; layer greens into lasagna; use large spinach leaves instead of a tortilla to wrap around cheese, beans and salsa. Lightly steam chopped collards and mix into mashed potatoes. Add greens to stir-frys, soups and stews. Sauté them in a little olive oil and garlic.

6. Dark Orange Vegetables

“I feel so much better when I snack on carrots and peanut butter than when I pig out on chips and other greasy foods,” says Lana, a waitress in San Diego who has lost 15 pounds in the past year. Maybe it’s the crunch. Or maybe it’s the fiber. Then again, even a small serving of deep-orange vegetables supplies five times the Daily Value for beta-carotene, an antioxidant that protects the brain from damage. The more richly colored vegetables you eat, the more brain protection you get. Bright orange veggies also supply hefty amounts of vitamin C, potassium and iron and more fiber than a slice of whole-wheat bread or a bowl of oatmeal. For every half-cup serving, their ORAC scores range from 528 for butternut squash and 884 for carrots to 2,820 for sweet potatoes.

Besides, the more colorful fruits and vegetables you eat, the sharper your mind and the easier it is to lose weight and keep it off. The more produce you include in your daily diet and the longer you eat that way, the longer you will live healthy and the sharper your mind.

How much? 1+ cup a day.

Eat more: Microwave and top sweet potatoes with maple syrup and pecans. Puree cooked yams or carrots and add to soups as a thickener. Use sweet potatoes instead of potatoes in salads. Slice sweet potatoes into wedges, salt and bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes for golden fries. Cook, mash and use winter squash instead of noodles or rice as a base for any dish. Add roasted butternut squash cubes to canned soups.

More Produce, Less Pesticides

To minimize pesticides in your diet:

7. Broth Soups

The ultimate trick to permanent weight loss is to feel satisfied on fewer calories. That trick includes two accomplices: fiber and water.

We all push back from the table when we have eaten a given weight of food, according to research from the Pennsylvania State University. Since a pound of celery supplies fewer calories than a pound of chocolate, it’s no surprise that happy, fit people who design their diets around fiber-and water-packed foods, such as vegetables, soups, stews and smoothies, fill up on fewer calories, feel satisfied between meals and have an easier time managing their weights compared to those who snack on chips and cookies.

People average about 135 calories less when the meal contains soup. That might not sound like much, but over the course of a year it equates to a 14-pound loss! Weight-loss experts predict that if Americans cut just 100 calories a day, it would halt the obesity epidemic in this country. That’s three bites of food, 10 minutes of walking or a daily bowl of soup.

That’s exactly what Jennifer, an accountant in Chicago, found when she switched from a bag to a thermos for lunch:

“I have a desk job, which means it is easy for me to gain weight if I’m not careful about what I eat. I was gaining slowly, but surely, for the last couple of years even though I brought my own lunch and tried to make it healthy. When I switched to a thermos of soup, a yogurt and a piece of fruit for lunch, I found that it filled me up and kept me going through the afternoon and I wasn’t as tempted to grab a piece of chocolate off a coworker’s desk.”

The trick is to make calorie-dilute foods, such as broth-based soups, stews, smoothies, and fruits and vegetables (other than fried potatoes) the basis of a meal plan, not the whole diet. To boost the ORAC score, the soup should be loaded with colorful vegetables, such as carrots, green peas, sweet potato chunks and spinach. (Hint: soup-only diets don’t work, but soup added to a healthful diet does.)

How much? Serve a broth-based soup for one meal (lunch or dinner) on most days.

Eat more: Make a big batch of homemade vegetable soup to use throughout the week. Season with Mrs. Dash or True Lemon to make the flavor pop without salt. Use canned soups with the word healthy in the title and add extra frozen peas and carrots or chopped spinach. At restaurants, make soup your main course.

8. Legumes

We all know that beans are mind-bogglingly good for you. Whether they are lentils, chick peas, split peas or black, kidney, navy or pinto beans, legumes are packed with nutrients that improve mood, such as folate, calcium, copper, magnesium, iron and zinc. The folate in beans protects against a memory-destroying compound called homocysteine. The antioxidant phytonutrients in legumes, such as saponins and phytosterols, lower cancer and heart disease risk. Their massive antioxidant content explains why their ORAC scores are so high: a cup of beans has between 4,000 and 13,000 ORAC points!

Beans are the perfect diet food. They are almost fat-free but high in protein, water and fiber—the magic combo for feeling full and satisfied on few calories. One cup of cooked legumes has up to 16 grams of fiber! You would have to eat eight slices of whole-wheat bread, five bananas or four cups of corn to get that much fiber. Legumes are very low on the glycemic index and thus help regulate blood sugar as well as appetite.

Yet, bean cuisine is low on people’s priority lists—most of us average only about a cup of beans a year, a pittance compared to the 50 pounds of pork we gobble at the same time.

It is hard to get excited about “the musical fruit,” no matter how nutritious, tasty and antioxidant-packed it is. That is, until you start listing specifics. “If I tell my family we are having beans for dinner, all I get is a chorus of moans,” says Eleanor, a working mom in Cincinnati. “But if I tell them we are having Boston baked beans with corn bread or creamy lentil soup with chipotle sauce, their mouths start to water.” So get the frown off your face and start looking for excuses to add more beans to your diet—your mood and waistline will thank you for it.

How much? One cup at least four times a week.

Eat more: Use beans in salads and burritos, or sprinkle with cilantro and serve hot on top of rice. Add extra canned beans to soups. Skip the ranch dip and dunk vegetables in hummus.

Degassing Beans

The offending substances in beans that cause bloating and gas are a special type of starch. People who don’t eat beans frequently have low levels of the enzyme that breaks down this starch, so bacteria in the gut do it for them, with the unpopular side effect of gas. The good news: the more beans you eat, the less likely you will suffer from gas, since your body will make more of that important enzyme. In the meantime, to degas beans:
  • Soak raw beans, then discard the water before cooking.
  • Cook beans thoroughly.
  • Eat slowly, so you don’t gulp air, which only worsens the problem.
  • Use Beano, which supplies the enzyme your body is missing.
  • Drink lots of water.
  • For canned beans, drain liquid and rinse beans.

9. Citrus

Sweet and tart, fresh and clean. If morning sunshine had a scent it would be citrus; that aroma also holds the secret to a happy mood and weight loss.

Citrus fruit is one of the most nutritious of all the fruits. A cup of grapefruit sections supplies 1,104 ORAC points and your entire day’s requirement for vitamin C. A glass of OJ supplies 165% of a woman’s RDA for vitamin C and 1,936 ORAC points (that’s because it takes about a pound of oranges to make a cup of OJ).

Moodwise, vitamin C is important in boosting energy, since it helps absorb iron and maintain healthy red blood cells that carry oxygen to every cell in the body, including the brain. Without iron, your brain literally suffocates, leaving you groggy, depressed, too pooped to appreciate life and totally unmotivated. The vitamin C in citrus also helps curb the stress response, lowering stress hormone levels and possibly reducing blood pressure. People even report they feel calmer during stress when they consume enough vitamin C.

Oranges are brimming with folate (a B vitamin essential to brain function and mood), while all citrus are overflowing in phytonutrients, fiber and potassium, a mineral essential for energy and preventing fatigue. Just 1 cup of any citrus juice supplies about a quarter of your daily potassium needs (you’d have to drink twice as much apple juice to get the same amount of potassium). Hundreds of different phytonutrients have been identified in citrus, with names like terpenes, flavonoids, coumarins and carotenoids. Most of these phytonutrients protect the brain and improve memory.

How much? 1+ serving a day (one piece of fruit or a 6-ounce glass of juice).

Eat more: Oranges are the perfect bring-along snack. Or place a bowl of grapefruit sections on the dining table or at your work desk. Make fruit smoothies or parfaits with oranges. Mix orange sections into yogurt. Dunk orange sections in fat-free dark chocolate syrup. In recipes, pair oranges or grapefruit with roasted sweet potatoes in a salad, use fresh orange or lime juice and maple syrup for marinades, and mix orange sections into guacamole, tossed salads and rice dishes. Add lemon juice or zest to any dish to enhance flavor.

10. Wheat Germ

You don’t get much better on the cal-a-nut ratio than with wheat germ. The heart of the wheat kernel is a gold mine of nutrition. Half a cup of toasted wheat germ supplies 100% of your daily need for folic acid and 50% of your magnesium, zinc and vitamin E requirements. Vitamin E–rich diets help prevent and slow the progression of—and might even lower the risk for developing—Alzheimer’s disease by up to 70%. Wheat germ supplies decent amounts of trace minerals, such as iron and zinc. You also get a truckload of phytonutrients, including octacosanol, a compound that improves endurance and helps the body cope with stress.

How much? ¼ cup or more a day.

Eat more: Sprinkle on oatmeal or yogurt, add to cookie and pancake batters, mix into muffin or meatloaf recipes or blend with honey and peanut butter for a sandwich spread.

11. Tart Cherries

You know they make a great pie, but you might not know that this ruby-red fruit is a rich source of a wide array of nutrients, including fiber, potassium, magnesium, iron, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin B6, vitamin E and folate. They have a low–glycemic index score of 54 (any score less than 55 is considered low), thus producing a mild rise in blood sugar levels associated with lowered risks for diabetes and weight gain.

Just slightly more than 3 ounces of tart cherry juice concentrate supplies 12,800 ORAC points (that’s because there are 100 fresh cherries in an 8-ounce glass of cherry juice). A quarter cup of dried cherries rates 3,060 on the ORAC scale. In fact, a study from the University of Minnesota found that cherries, with their high amount of anthocyanins, were in the top 33 foods for highest antioxidant content, surpassing well-known leaders, such as red wine, prunes and dark chocolate. These anthocyanins protect brain cells from oxidative damage associated with nerve damage, thus lowering the risk for memory loss, dementia and even Alzheimer’s disease. They might even help reverse brain aging. (While tart cherries are rich sources of anthocyanins, maraschino cherries are not, since the delicate phytochemical is lost in the processing and replaced with food coloring.)

Finally, cherries might be useful for both sleep and memory. They are one of the few foods that contain melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep. A few studies also show that the anthocyanins in cherries might aid with weight loss.

How much? One cup of raw tart cherries or a ¼ cup of dried tart cherries four times a week.

Eat more: Add dried tart cherries to side dishes, such as rice pilafs or vegetable dishes. Mix dried tart cherries with peanut butter for a new twist on the PB & J, add cherries to oatmeal cookie recipes in place of raisins, and toss in dried cherries when making apple pie. Add dried tart cherries to tossed salads, fruit salads and slaws. Include dried tart cherries in baked items. Use tart cherry juice in smoothies, toddies, iced teas, punches, lemonades, sangrias and coolers.

12. Berries

Gladys attributes her sharp-as-a-tack 98-year-old memory to the berries she has eaten all her life. “As a kid raised on a farm in southern Oregon, my sisters and I used to sneak off after dinner and have our dessert standing in the berry patch eating right off the vine,” she recalls. Gladys never lost her love of berries and still eats them every day. “I hold my own at Jeopardy, which isn’t bad for someone my age, especially since I’m up against my great-grandchildren!”

These sweet and juicy fruits are the perfect water and fiber combination for weight loss. They also are loaded with B vitamins, vitamin C and antioxidants, such as flavonoids, resveratrol and more than 40 different anthocyanins. In fact, a cup of berries adds anywhere from 6,000 to 13,000 ORAC points to the daily diet. These potent antioxidants strengthen tissue defenses against oxidation and inflammation, which are underlying factors in most age-related diseases, from heart disease and cancer to memory loss, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The antioxidants in berries might even help reverse memory loss. Best of all, frozen berries are just as antioxidant-packed as fresh, so enjoy these nutrient gold mines all year around.

Berries are more than just antioxidants. Research from Tufts University shows that these little fruits regulate our genes! They turn on the cells’ production of disease-fighting chemicals that then work 24/7 to protect the brain and all the body’s tissues from damage. No wonder they improve cell communication, stimulate nerve cell growth and enhance brain cell connections. Wow!

How much? One or more cups of berries three times a week.

Eat more: Switch from ice cream to frozen blueberries for an after-dinner snack. Blend into smoothies or add to homemade salsa. Dip strawberries in fat-free chocolate syrup. Layer with yogurt for a parfait. Add to tossed salads or muffin and pancake batters. Briefly cook blueberries with a little Splenda, lemon juice and corn starch and use as a topping for pancakes, French toast, waffles and ice cream.

Anti-Superfoods: Avoid at All Costs!

  • Salad dressing: A plate of crispy greens is one of life’s little fat-free pleasures. But many fatty concoctions are guzzled under the guise of salad fixings. Salad dressing is the number one source of fat in women’s diets. Drowning greens in dressing attests to the confusion over what is really a healthful salad and what is a fat-laden disaster. For example, a Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad at McDonalds has only 210 calories and almost 2 teaspoons of fat, but add a packet of dressing and you crank the calories up to 400 and the fat to more than 6 teaspoons.

Eat less: Choose small amounts of low-fat dressings, salad spritzers or fat-free dressings. At restaurants, ask for the dressing on the side, and lightly dip the fork into the dressing and then into the salad, leaving most of the dressing behind at the end of the meal.

  • Potatoes: One third of our daily vegetable choices are potatoes, particularly potato chips and French fries. Just 10 French fries add 158 calories and more than 2 teaspoons of fat to the diet, much of which is artery-clogging saturated or trans fats. Potatoes rank so high on the glycemic index scale that some experts say they should be placed at the top of the Food Pyramid along with sugar and fat.

Eat less: Switch to sweet potatoes and you’ll get four times the calcium and vitamin B2 and twice the vitamin C. While traditional potatoes have no beta-carotene, even a small sweet potato packs in three times your daily allotment of this potent antioxidant, which lowers your risk for heart disease and cancer and reduces the redness and skin inflammation of sunburn—a sign of accelerated aging and cancer of the skin.
  • Cheese: We’ve cut back on whole milk in an effort to reduce saturated fat, but we’ve more than made up the difference by gobbling three times as much cheese. Cheese now outranks meat as the number one source of saturated fat in the diet. Two-thirds of that cheese is added to fast and processed foods.

Eat less: Switch to low-fat cheeses. At restaurants, ask for half or no cheese on menu items.

  • Cream: Between 1985 and 2001, average consumption of cream products, including sour cream, doubled to 20 half pints a person a year. It’s likely intake is even higher now because of the low-carb diet fad that drove people to higher-fat fare. Cream consumption has been on a steady rise since the early 1990s, with adults today averaging more than 10 pounds of cream every year. We polish off about a half quart of ice cream every week, with a typical adult in the Midwest topping the charts at almost 42 quarts a year!

Eat less: Fat-free half & half could save you several hundred calories a day. Switch to sorbets and low-fat ice cream (or frozen blueberries!), and keep the serving to the recommended ½ cup.

Pile It On!

If I told you I had a pill that would take 20 years off your age, help you lose weight, improve your mind and concentration, boost your mood, have all the energy you need or want, and sleep and handle stress better, would you take it? Of course you would.

Well, it isn’t a pill, it’s a plate. Fill your plate with piles of super mood foods and you will look, act, feel, think and sleep better. You will be leaner and healthier, too.